Why Your Heart Loves Breakfast Even if You Don't

Some of my earliest memories of growing up in a small northern Utah town are about having breakfast. No matter how early I needed to leave in the morning, my mother always woke me up in time to make me some type of breakfast. These were simple meals — usually cereal, fruit, and toast — but they left enduring impressions and helped teach me that patterns and habits that are important in reducing your risk of heart disease begin early. First, I learned from my mother that breakfast was an important way to start my day. Second, I learned that my mother cared about me and wanted me to be healthy.

Fast-forward more than three decades, and my breakfast patterns are not so simple. I try to exercise before taking a 30-minute commute. My meetings usually start at 7 a.m., and when those time slots are filled, some begin even earlier. Before I begin a clinic or start medical procedures, I need to do rounds, seeing hospital patients with heart disease who are under my care. So breakfast is now something I take with me on my commute. I know I'm not alone in this habit, as I see others driving with fruit, burritos, or cereal bars in hand while navigating morning traffic.

If, like me, you're somewhat conflicted about your breakfasts, let’s examine the evidence on the subject.

Breakfast Can Lower Risk of Heart Disease

A 16-year study published in 2013 in Circulation examined the impact of skipping breakfast on heart-related health in 26,902 men ages 45 to 82. Physicians, dentists, veterinarians, pharmacists, and optometrists were among those represented in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, a group originally examined in 1992 and then again for this study.

The authors found that men who skipped breakfast were 27 percent more likely to develop coronary artery disease than men who ate a morning meal. Risk of heart disease was even worse — 55 percent — for those who ate late at night in addition to skipping breakfast. Both are considered poor eating habits.

Men with poor eating patterns also worked more, slept less, and had higher rates of obesity and high blood pressure. When researchers accounted for all the raised risk factors, two patterns persisted:

The most concerning thing to me is that research shows these risk factors can start to develop very early in life: when you're skipping breakfast during childhood.

Breakfast Changes How You Burn Energy

In my clinic, my patients often tell me they've started to skip a meal — usually breakfast — to lose weight and improve their health. This choice is often prompted by the idea that taking in fewer calories means there will be fewer calories to be converted to fat. But is this really what happens when you skip breakfast?

In a study published in 2015 in Obesity, teenagers who routinely skipped breakfast were put on one of three eating plans: a high-protein breakfast, a normal-protein breakfast, or no breakfast. The teens who ate a high-protein breakfast lost weight; this group also reported feeling less hungry throughout the day, and they ate fewer total calories during the day when compared to those eating a normal-protein breakfast or skipping breakfast.

This study highlights the problems with skipping breakfast. Contrarily, eating breakfast actually acts as an appetite suppressant, as a small study of 12 men published in 2011 in the Journal of Nutrition shows: Participants who ate a simple breakfast had a four-fold increase in the likelihood that they would feel full and not get hungry throughout the day.

Another notion is that breakfast gets the body going; it turns out this is true. People who eat breakfast burn more energy in a phenomenon called diet-induced thermogenesis. Taking your baseline metabolism energy and dividing it by the energy content of your food is how you measure thermogenesis, which varies throughout the day. But in people who eat breakfast, thermogenesis rises in the morning and stays higher during the day. Thermogenesis is one of the key factors behind obesity.

These studies teach us that with breakfast, you have more energy and you're more efficient at using it. If this is true, perhaps exercise performance will improve with breakfast.

Breakfast Lowers Your Risk of Stroke

Stroke, which is caused by blood clots or by bleeding in the brain, shares many of the same risk factors as coronary artery disease. So if skipping breakfast raises the risk of developing coronary artery disease, perhaps it also increases risk of stroke.

In a study published January 2016 in Stroke of 82,772 Japanese men and women ages 45 to 74, researchers wanted to find out if skipping breakfast changed the risk of stroke. Study participants were divided into four groups based on how often a person ate breakfast per week: zero to two times, three to four times, five to six times, or every day. The authors' results linked eating breakfast to profound heart-health and brain-health benefits.

Compared to those people who ate breakfast daily, here are the important results.

Those who ate breakfast zero to two times per week had:

23 percent increased rate of stroke

48 percent increase in severe brain bleeds

19 percent increased risk of coronary artery disease

And those who ate breakfast three to four times per week had:

19 percent increased rate of stroke

31 percent increase in severe brain bleeds

43 percent increased risk of coronary artery disease

The increased risk of stroke and brain bleeds in those who frequently skipped breakfast were highly significant. And the results remained significant even when the researchers accounted for diet and lifestyle choices: how much alcohol, vegetables, fish, soy, nuts, and fiber they ate, as well as whether they smoked, and how much sleep and physical activity they got.

It turns out that the age-old truth passed down to me as a child has a lot of evidence behind it: Eating a healthy breakfast is a great way to start your day.

In addition to lowering your risk of obesity, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and stroke, breakfast can also decrease feelings of hunger throughout the day. And finally, eating breakfast will increase your energy and help you become more efficient at burning calories.

Tomorrow morning, make a healthy choice and take time to eat breakfast.

Important: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not Everyday Health.